


virtues and vices

by DeCarabas



Series: Fugitives Together [38]
Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: Character Study, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-02
Updated: 2017-07-02
Packaged: 2018-11-22 06:19:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 1,778
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11374344
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DeCarabas/pseuds/DeCarabas
Summary: Virtue and vice themed ficlets written for teamblueandangry's Anders Appreciation Week.





	1. wrath and forgiveness

He can’t heal.

There’s a woman on the docks of Highever. An accident. The Wardens can’t be far behind him, and Karl and Kirkwall are ahead, and there’s a confused tangle in Anders’ mind—Justice’s mind—whatever he’s made of himself, but he kneels over her and this, at least, should be simple and straightforward. Something that speaks to the part of him that’s just Anders.

She’d been too close to an argument on a crowded gangplank. Just a bystander. A careless shove, and she’d slipped into the water, hit her head on the way down, and. Where’s the person who shoved her?

…That doesn’t matter. Outrage isn’t going to help her right now. He needs to focus, draw in Compassion.

And the anger he’s feeling when he looks at the blood in her hair is completely unsuited to that, sitting in his mind like something solid. And the docks are still full of people who haven’t even noticed the injured woman or the little crowd around her, people still just arguing over prices and passing coin from hand to hand and balancing parcels in their arms and doing absolutely nothing to help, and… it makes no sense to be angry about that.

Justice doesn’t heal. And Anders chokes down a rising sense of panic that he’s managed to destroy this, too.

_Compassion, damn it. Think only of her pain._

He smooths his expression in an effort to convince both the patient’s anxiously watching friend and himself. Adjusts. And he tries again.


	2. greed and charity

When Samson says he’s turned away an apostate in need for not having enough coin, Hawke doesn’t blink. Goes without saying, really. Safety is expensive. Even the collective back home had always expected some kind of reward whenever he’d had to resort to asking for their help, and this is Kirkwall; breathing is expensive.

Anders, though. Lip curled and brows drawn down into a look of complete and utter contempt, he says, “I pity any mage who is forced to rely on you for protection,” and Hawke honestly isn’t sure he’s real.

He even talks like something out of a story. Does that come with the Warden training?

And they can’t all run free clinics, and a little money flowing makes the world go round, but the look on Anders’ face in that moment sticks with Hawke, as if he’d somehow expected better, as if the world is supposed to be better than it is.

Yet he keeps looking at Hawke with so much faith.


	3. lust and chastity

When Hawke finally manages to summon a wisp to hover between them, finally figures out the trick to it, he laughs out loud. Startling in the quiet of the Deep Roads. And watching the gentle light play over Hawke’s profile, his face turning upward to follow the wisp, the curve of his lips, Anders can’t help an answering smile.

Hawke reaches out with a tentative finger, and that gentle light flares up and bursts into a tiny flame, threads of creation magic collapsing into elemental and unraveling, singeing Hawke’s fingertip as it sputters out.

As first summoning attempts go, it could have been worse. And Hawke’s smile is a little sheepish but still just as wide as Anders takes his hand, soothes away the pain with a touch.

A line pops into his head. _Passion’s changing fire_ … it’s a quote from somewhere, but it takes him a moment to place it, to sort out which set of memories that’s coming from.

There had been this sonnet he’d had to memorize for one of the senior enchanters’ classes. Tevinter poet, but the _right_ kind of Tevinter, which is to say, safely dead and inclined to write cautionary tales about spirits corrupted by careless mages. _Though love I was, your passion’s changing fire has forged this spirit into cruel Desire._ Love poetry turned dry and dull and wrapped up in a lecture on the importance of belief, of avoiding distractions. Spirits are swayed so easily.

And he’s feeling easily swayed, here, now, far below the surface, far from any templar or anything to fight for or any kind of justice except the man beside him and the way these simple lessons together make his eyes light up; and Anders has started having nightmares about growing Desire’s horns.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sonnet 126, "The Lover and His Spirit", from [A Chant for Dreamers by Magister Oratius](http://dragonage.wikia.com/wiki/Codex_entry:_Spirits_and_Demons)


	4. gluttony and temperance

“So, Varric. Funny story. Corff won’t take my money anymore. Any idea why that would be?”

From Anders’ tone, he already knows exactly why that would be, exactly who’s taken care of his tab at the Hanged Man. But Varric’s got a lot of practice at ignoring unspoken questions, and it’s easy to pretend picking his way over the rocky slope of Sundermount requires his full attention. It’s not far from the truth; he’s pretty sure this ‘road’ was designed by mountain goats. “You know Corff. Always was a sucker for strays.” 

“Yes, that sounds like Corff,” Anders says dryly.

It’s not as if Anders has run up much of a tab. Do possessed Wardens even get hungry, or has he been trying to just live off of… whatever it is spirits live off of. The air and dreams, for all he knows. Mostly spirits seem to want to eat the heroic types who go poking around caves on Sundermount and their unfortunate tagalong narrators.

Hungry for justice, that’s a title… not a very good one. Never mind.

“Thank you,” Anders says, and if he’s been living on air and dreams, at least he’s getting air outside of the sewers once in a while. A little less of that raw look around the eyes.


	5. sloth and diligence

Anders sits at Merrill’s table, flipping through an old book detailing the useful properties of the plants and creatures of Sundermount and the surrounding areas and how they can be combined to best effect. Trying to figure out what he’s going to do with the liver that Hawke had dug out of a drake for him.

Which had been… thoughtful.

And good for the blood, he’s pretty sure. Or gout. Or else liver’s very, very bad for gout… he always used to skip those classes, all the mind-numbing lists of what affects which of the four humors. Those and the herbalism ones. That whole mess.

It’s a fine and admirable craft and all that, all right; he could appreciate the importance of the herbalists and apothecaries when there’s no better option available. Granted. But mostly those lectures had just left him stewing over all the people back home, all the time wasted treating problems that could so easily be solved with a bit of magic, and all the perfectly good healers sitting in the tower, twiddling their thumbs, waiting for the Chantry to decide who was or wasn’t worth their skill. The ones with the coin, mostly. The kid mucking out the cattle barn, not so much.

He’d always felt like that was the point of spirit healing. So that people didn’t have to resort to messing around with herbs and leeches.

Except _people_ now means _him_ , apparently. Because the magic never seems to stretch far enough.

“Why does Hawke bring me these things,” he mutters.

Merrill doesn’t look up from the grimoire that he brought over for her. “I thought he was courting you. Isn’t he?”

Well. Yes. There is that. Though courting implies this is actually going to go somewhere and that’s really not an option here, but… yes. And it’s a thoughtful gift and drake parts are hard to acquire, he’s not about to turn it down, but. “There are actual apothecaries around who could get much better use out of this, I’m fairly sure. Ones who could pay him.”

“Wouldn’t be much of a courting gift then.”

He makes a frustrated noise and flips the pages of Merrill’s pharmacopeia.

He really did go to a lot of trouble to dig that liver out of the drake.


	6. envy and kindness

_Envy is what a demon feels, a desire for something it cannot have._ Anders remembers saying that once, in Kristoff’s body.

Those moments when he closes his eyes and feels the wind on his face, remembering floating weightless without feeling a thing; those moments when he sees, really sees, how vibrant the colors are in the physical world; seeing the familiar with new eyes. That wasn’t the reason Justice wanted a living body, he knows it wasn’t, not mostly. He’s no demon. But those moments of appreciation have always been followed by a pang of uneasy guilt all the same.

Those moments, those sights and those sensations, and that faint surprise every time he gets to witness some connection between people that lasts longer than a dream. The dog that recognizes him. The sound of Hawke’s heartbeat, still there when Anders wakes up.

He looks up at the curtains of Hawke’s bed, all that vibrant red. All this time, there’s a part of him that’s been bracing for… he doesn’t know what. Horns, probably. This is selfish, utterly selfish.

But mortals are selfish too, not just demons, and maybe that’s something else that part of him is growing to appreciate about the whole mortal experience, because where that pang of guilt should be, there’s only a quiet sense of wonder. As if he’s watching a dream that he was never meant to have, one that might vanish if he holds it too close, but when he curls closer to Hawke’s side, it’s all still here.


	7. pride and humility

Audacity didn’t try to tempt Merrill with promises about the mirror. Well, once or twice, when it was particularly desperate. But generally, that’s not quite how it worked.

One of the mages from the Circle that doesn’t exist anymore is arguing with Anders on the outskirts of their camp, not quite out of earshot. Or arguing _at_ Anders, rather. Anders isn’t doing a lot of talking back, for a change.

And the things Audacity used to say to her, mostly, weren’t really about the mirror at all. What it said to her was that she knew what the clan needed better than they did. 

They were blinded by their fear, and that was understandable; the Blight, the spirits, the blood magic, they _were_ dangerous. But if she didn’t find a way to deal with these things now, more people were just going to get hurt, just like Tamlen, like Mahariel. Like Karl, she supposes. And it was a Keeper’s duty to take that risk. To help her people, even if they didn’t want her to help.

It’s dangerous to pay too much attention to spirits. But she’s still not sure it was wrong. It’s just… complicated.

And she sits by the campfire and listens to Anders not argue with the Circle mage he’d been trying to help.


End file.
